David Dodge, CPC

SALT Manager – CPA Firm

CPA Firm

Scenario

Headwaters Search met with a mid-sized CPA firm located in the Twin Cities. Asked what their most pressing opening was, the director of talent acquisition and development shared the firm’s need for a state and local tax manager. Their client base had recently added several large clients and the firm needed to bring on additional expertise to develop and manage this area of their company.

Challenge

Our client had tried all of the traditional ways to identify possible candidates: posting on job boards, their website, and social media, as well as offering employees incentives for referrals. The position was still unfilled after more than six months of searching for a qualified candidate.

The requirements for this position made it extremely difficult to effectively place in a candidate-driven market. The potential hiring management candidate needed to have more than eight years of SALT managerial experience, a CPA, and an additional advanced degree.

Strategy

Headwaters Search’s specialty and experience working within the Twin Cities’ accounting and finance market helped accelerate our search process. However, with fewer than 300 state and local tax CPAs in this regional hiring market, we had to use every resource at our disposal to uncover every possible candidate.

We identified all possibilities and set up a multiple contact outreach strategy that included email, social media connection requests, phone calls, and referrals from our dedicated Twin Cities accounting network.

Results

After four weeks of intense work, we identified a talented candidate who was a perfect fit for our client’s opening. With a 20-plus-year career—in both Big Four public accounting and as a tax manager in a large corporation—our candidate possessed both a CPA and a JD degree. She was not only highly qualified but also very interested in the prospect of a change leading to career development.

After presenting her to our client’s hiring team, they moved quickly to present her to their senior leadership and to those managers with whom she would have frequent interactions. There was an overwhelming consensus that this candidate met their hiring needs exactly and would be a significant boon to their company culture. Headwaters Search worked with our client to help craft an offer that was both competitive and appealing to our candidate.

She accepted and three years later is still managing our client’s SALT department.

David Dodge, CPC

With over twenty years of executive search and thirty years of business leadership experience in public and private companies, David Dodge has filled positions with many financial industry leaders and forerunners.

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